Battered Women's Protective Strategies

Stronger Than You Know

Sherry Hamby

Description

Battered Women's Protective Strategies: Stronger Than You Know challenges the pervasive stereotypes that depict battered women as passive and shows how to use the strength of battered women to create better and more nuanced research and intervention. Through an alternative strengths-based framework, Hamby deftly illustrates how battered women are in fact not passive and in denial but are active and diligent in protecting themselves and their loved ones. In addition to the traditional risks of being battered, many women who experience abuse face the risk of homelessness or the threat of losing custody of their children in a divorce battle. Understanding the full range of risks is necessary to understanding the complex problem of battering, and in this book, quantitative, qualitative, and clinical data reveal a wide range of protective strategies: immediate defensive responses in the moments following an attack, protecting children and other loved ones, reaching out for social support, turning to religious and spiritual resources, and engaging formal helpseeking. Using an approach called Multiple Criteria Decision Making, this book outlines a procedure for comprehensive risk assessment, safety planning, and risk management. Many, many strategies are still largely invisible to providers and researchers, and the steps that women take that receive very little attention or acknowledgement in the domestic violence field. The author identifies the vital role that researchers can play by simply acknowledging the variety of approaches that battered women employ. In this book's two new studies, survivors of domestic violence identify 133 different protective strategies in open-ended questions. These and other insights from survivor testimony make this volume the largest and most comprehensive review of battered women's strengths to date.

Battered Women's Protective Strategies

Stronger Than You Know

Sherry Hamby

Author Information

Sherry Hamby, PhD, is a Research Professor and the Director of the Life Paths Research Program at the University of the South. She was appointed to the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Center for Disease Control, and she joined the Research Advisory Council of the National Latin@ Network. She is also the founding Editor of Psychology of Violence.

Battered Women's Protective Strategies

Stronger Than You Know

Sherry Hamby

From Our Blog

The theme of the American Society of Criminology meeting this November is "Criminology at the Intersections of Oppression." The burden of violence and victimization remains markedly unequal. The prevalence rates, risk factors, and consequences of violence are not equally distributed across society.

By Sherry Hamby The common stereotypes about battered women are wrong and not based on up-to-date science.Â Here are five common myths about battered women and the real truths about the realities and complexities of domestic violence.

By Sherry Hamby One woman, to save money to prepare for leaving her abusive husband, sewed $20 bills into the hemlines of old clothes in the back of her closet. Another woman started volunteering at her school so she could keep close watch over her children and earned Volunteer of the Year at her school.